Well, the first step in letting history repeat is to insist that those circumstance were insane, senseless, and incomprehensible. And interesting tactic for a person who is claimed has a special ability to understand others.

5 comments

#14 Someone should really come up with a name for this genre of hack punditry. It works like this, take a speech a politican makes about something no one really disagrees about (Nazi’s bad, mothers good, children cute, etc.). Pluck out a line that on the surface sounds totally innocent, but demonstrate how not only is it wrong but it’s the spearhead of an evil agenda to to destroy all that is good and holy in the world.

What’s fun about this rhetorical trick is that it always works. For example, if a politican says a bunch of KKKers who kill someone for being the wrong race are ‘horrible racits’, then make a big deal about failing to call them murders. if the politican calls them murders, note that he failed to call them out as terrorist murders. If he calls them that, fault him for not calling them ‘super evil racist terrorist murders’ etc.

These are the tricks you have to know if you’re a hack and are expected to produce so much copy every single day to earn your keep.

Boonton,
That would be interesting … if that was what was going on. This wasn’t a off-the-cuff remark or speech. It was the official US statement made in response to the current memorial/remembrance of the Holocaust some care was made in crafting the statement and accordingly it can be examined carefully.

But … apparently according to you, no criticism of the sentiments offered is allowed. The criticism I offered on my part was that this shouldn’t be seen as something that happens those “other” evil people. That we need to on guard that that banal evil doesn’t creep into our lives as it did in Germany, that going along with what is accepted isn’t examined because it’s the thing to do (another plug for that other book you’ve been studiously avoiding, Ms Delsol’s Unlearned Lessons). Germany and the Nazis got accepted because their ideals were seen as natural outcomes of the philosophical utopian dreams of the late 19th and early 20th centuries … as did Communism.

If Obama had given an untraditional “Nazis were sensible, not senseless, evil’ speech do you think for a moment the National Review would have been running an article “Obama finally gets it!”? Of course not because the piece if partisan hackery. You are free to develop your criticisms of ‘official sentiments’